This informative article provides a good reason to
contribute directly to your candidate of choice rather than a Political Action
Committee (PAC). For that matter I stopped donating money to the National Republican
Party because of the influence of Establishment RINOs who consistently vote
with Dems. In 2020 I’ll be giving my money directly to a Conservative candidate,
especially if a RINO needs defeated in a Primary. Indeed, RINOs are the reason
I’m a registered Independent rather than a Republican.
JRH 6/10/19
Your generosity is always appreciated:
*****************
The Sad Truth:
Political Hucksters Harm the Conservative Movement
By Justin O. Smith
Sent 6/9/2019 4:02 AM
All of Conservative America would not be surprised to hear
that money given to the Democratic Party, a largely immoral and criminal party,
and its political action committees (PACs) is misspent and goes into the
pockets of the organizers more so than it gets to any candidate, but they
expect much more from the Republican Party which claims to represent the
"Moral Majority". The sad truth is that conservatives are being
defrauded and scammed by PAC operators and fundraisers on or near every election
cycle and during every major unfolding political crisis. And a lot of
self-proclaimed watchdogs sound one false alarm after another rather than
expose the efforts of former allies of President Trump to line their own
pockets, diverting funds away from endeavors that would actually facilitate
President Trump's agenda, a major problem that is also experienced in many
other Republican campaigns.
Each new election and each new political cause finds
Americans inundated by repetitive pleas for money that can and often do quickly
change focus to the scandal of the day, whether it is pertaining to illegal
immigration, Obamacare, Hillary Clinton escaping justice or Benghazi and
Islamic terrorism. Old PACs associated with dormant issues or newly neutralized
politicians are shifted to newly perceived money making issues.
These groups run all sorts of polls and studies, and they
know where the profit is to be found among conservative base voters who are
searching for outsider candidates, and their scams eventually take their toll.
Conservatives think they are giving to a greater cause than themselves, but
when results are short due to the lion's share of the money being siphoned off
by so-called "consultants", everybody soon gets burned out and quits
donating money, even to the legitimate causes.
Just prior to the 2018 elections,
the Tea Party Majority Fund raised $1.67 million and donated $35,000 to
candidates. During this same period, Conservative Majority Fund raised $1
million and donated $7500, while Conservative Strike Force raised $258,376 and
donated nothing to any candidate.
Put Vets First raised approximately $4 million, in 2018, and
only gave $9000 to candidates.
In 2014, out of $43 million raised by thirty-three separate
political action committees, supposedly affiliated with the Tea Party, only $3
million was spent on ads and candidates facing tough campaigns often
highlighted in the appeals. The rest went to operating expenses, including $6
million to companies owned or managed by the operators of the PACs, according
to a study by Politico.
Also in 2014, the Black Republican PAC
raised $700,000, and it only spent one percent of those contributions on
candidates and ads supporting them, according to government filings.
It's also worth noting that the 2015 National Draft Ben Carson for
President PAC raised thirteen million dollars, none of which went
to Mr. Carson. Armstrong Williams, business manager for Carson, said: "People giving money
think it's going to Dr. Carson and it's not ... Our hands are tied. We don't
want people exploited."
In 2016, Roger Stone's
Committee to Restore America's Greatness raised $587,000 and only spent $16,000
for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Great America PAC raised nearly
$29 million from small donations, in 2016, and donated $30,125 to candidates
running for federal office. In 2018, donations totaled $8.3 million with almost
$32,000 going to candidates.
Some PACs also make large payments to vendors they own or
are run by people who work for them, as an unscrupulous means to hide how much
the PAC consultants are making, which is exactly what the Senate Conservatives Fund and American Crossroads were caught doing one year. Such
payments don't have to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, so
nobody really knows where the money goes, and all of this should set off red
flags for donors, as it represents a huge conflict of interest and facilitates
fine and decent Americans being separated from their hard earned dollars
through the perpetration of a fraud.
Even worse, most of these PACs prosper off of outright,
blatant lies they tell conservatives.
Milwaukee's Sheriff David Clarke didn't want to run for the Senate in
Wisconsin, and Laura Ingraham, Fox News host, wasn’t interested in running for
the Senate in Virginia. The PACs play the hero for conservative values and
freedom against the many real threats of today, and some they invent, when
they're actually nothing more than coastal political operatives keeping most of
the money for themselves.
All of this has severely hurt the Conservative Movement in
America, by possibly being a large factor in the GOP's loss of control of the
U.S. House of Representatives. This loss has severely damaged President Trump's
policy agenda and has him wasting too much valuable time on defense.
Imagine how different results might have been in 2018, if
only $10 million of the roughly $177 million raised by PACs had been spent on
real campaigns in the twenty House districts that Republicans lost by five
percentage points or less. The extra $500,000 per campaign might just have made
the difference in Mia Love's district in Utah, where she would have won, if she
had only received 625 more votes.
In Maine's 2nd District, Bruce Poliquin needed about 3500
more votes. Karen Handel, running in Georgia's 6th, needed 8000 more votes;
and, in California's 21st District, David Valadao lost by a mere 900
votes. [Ibid.]
Day after day, year after year, little old ladies are called
and emailed with dire news and warnings that America's future is at stake if a
certain amount of money isn't raised in a specific time frame -- that the
nation is doomed -- and so, these little old ladies donate money that many of
them really can't afford, because they love America and believe they're making
the world better. Unfortunately all they are doing is making these
telemarketers wealthier. And in the meantime, conservative candidates are
losing elections, biting the dust, convinced that if they had just had another few
hundred thousand dollars, they might have been victorious.
Any Trump supporter or conservative should be livid.
Going into the 2020 election season, Conservatives must do
their dead level best to make contributions directly to the candidate's campaign
office, or better yet the candidate himself. Stop handing your hard earned
money over to the political hucksters seeking to cash in on the angst of
conservative voters and end this terrible blight on the Conservative Movement,
ridding it of those self-interested confidence men acting at cross purposes to
America's best interests.
By Justin O. Smith
__________________
Edited by John R. Houk
Source links provide by the Editor.
© Justin O. Smith
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